Hyperoptic Grow Leadership Team for UK FTTP Broadband Rollout

City focused fibre optic (FTTP/B) broadband ISP Hyperoptic has today appointed Peter White to be its new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Naleena Gururani as their Chief People Officer (CPO). Both will work to help them roll-out a “full fibre” network to 2 million UK homes by 2021 and 5 million by 2024.

The move follows last year’s announcement of a £500m deployment plan (here), which is being supported by the investment arm of the Government of Abu Dhabi (Mubadala Investment Company) and others. Hyperoptic’s 1000+ workforce is expected to increase during this growth period to enable the company to scale its operations and become the “UK’s leading full fibre network provider” (difficult given that Openreach has an ambition to reach 15 million with FTTP by around 2025).

At present Hyperoptic’s network claims to cover more than 500,000 premises in parts of around 39 UK “Hyper Cities” (rising to 50 this year), which is usually installed inside large residential apartment buildings (e.g. Multi-Dwelling Units 50+ units / flats) or big office blocks. But they’re also looking to expand into smaller developments later in 2019, possibly even including individual housing (partly by harnessing existing cable ducts and poles).

Dana Tobak, CEO of Hyperoptic, said:

“UK consumers are receiving some of the worst broadband connections in the world, this has led to an unprecedented demand for our gigabit full fibre connections. As part of our ambition to reach 5m homes passed, we are building an Exec team to deliver and disrupt at scale. I am delighted to welcome Peter and Naleena who have demonstrated expertise in driving exponential growth against inertial incumbents.”

Peter joins Hyperoptic from Workshare, a SaaS provider where he was also CFO. Previously he also held CFO positions at Lumata, a business to business mobile marketing technology services group, as well as at České Radiokomunikace a.s., a provider of broadcasting, tower infrastructure and telecommunications services in the Czech Republic. Earlier in his career Peter was Corporate Finance Director at mobile network operator Three UK.

Meanwhile Naleena joins the ISP from telecoms provider Lebara, where she worked for ten years in a range of senior HR roles, most recently as Global HR Director. Prior to that she was Head of International Recruitment at Infosys, a global digital services and consulting firm.

By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.

Good company but i wish i could get this in Bridgwater,somerset or something similar here internet is super garbage and extremely expensive 1gbps impossible to get in this village kinda sad because i’m internet fanatic and i need fast upload speeds. BT one of the garbage companies and i can’t trust them.

It’s good, but not so good. Hyperoptic install mostly on multiple dwelling apartment blocks and high rise buildings. The problem is that Hyperoptic is not really FTTP so that is basically false advertisement. Although I have been told that before, they use CAT5E cables from the basement to the building apartments which are twisted pairs of copper.

I have discovered from research that the full 1GB speed is only attainable if the Cat5e cable is less than 100 meters into your apartment from the basement. Now if you live in a high rise building, particularly those in urban London in Canary Wharf/West India Quay there are residential buildings that are over 100 meters high.

If you live in the top floors you are doomed because you definitely aren’t going to receive 1Gbps! I don’t know if Hyperoptic will rearrange special exceptions for those over 100 meters but quite frankly their service is not regarded as FTTP with Cat5e cables! It is FTTH where the Fibre only enters the basement of the building but the rest of the cables are copper (Cat5e) that travel into your apartment.

Anyway, my building is only 62 meters high, so if Hyperoptic do come one day hopefully I won’t suffer from speed degradation. I’m still waiting for wayleave agreement from my building management team. But I would still prefer to have true FTTP rather than FTTB/H.

Hyperoptic is basically a sacrifice for those who won’t get true FTTP any time soon. But it’s not something I would truly desire after waiting so many years on ADSL and having not had FTTC yet. Hyperoptic is basically like FTTC except that the Fibre travels to the basement of your building/block. You would in fact get similar results if you’re lucky to have your FTTC cabinet less than 100 meters from your home..

I think you have confused the 100m Cat5e guaranteed performance distance with some absolute cut off. In my experience Cat5e works further and faster than that. The stated performance standard is merely the minimum specification that the cable has to meet. So in reality, in order to avoid getting sued left right and centre, manufacturers will make cable that exceed this by 2-3x.

In any case as I understand it Hyperoptic have been using Cat6e for some time now.

Cat5e is made of copper but to compare it to a phone line makes very little sense at all.

“Hyperoptic is basically like FTTC except that the Fibre travels to the basement of your building/block. You would in fact get similar results if you’re lucky to have your FTTC cabinet less than 100 meters from your home..”

Err not you won’t FTTC is limited in OR’s implementation to 76Mb/s down and 19Mb/s up and that is the best you will ever get from it. Yes, there is a profile that OR has no intention of implementing that allows 200Mb/s up & down but that is fantasy in the UK ATM. The Hyperoptic implementation allows a pretty reliable 850/850Mb/s up to 100m from their router. That is 10x + faster and a totally different league in latency etc.

You might also try considering that Hypoertic are not, in my experience, totally stupid and they could always put a powered switch half way up the tower block fed by fibre or it could be powered and feb by PoE from the basement switch (unlikely) but probably powered from wherever their in building UPS is sat. There are a number of reasons one being electrical safety where a 48VDC feed to power the router might well make sense. The cost of a decent 48 port 1G actively managed switch with a couple of 10G ports to provision is peanuts in the great scheme of things.

“If you live in the top floors you are doomed because you definitely aren’t going to receive 1Gbps!”

Nope – if it is sensibly implemented it can work perfectly well.

For domestic purposes I can assure you that Hypoeroptic is perfectly capable.

@A_Builder: Where my doubts are casted is from the recent letter few months ago from Hyperoptic for another one of our apartments which also suffers from wayleave issues which stated that only 50% of the residents can get 1Gbps, 100% for 150 Mbps. If you don’t believe me I can scan you my letter and upload it. Of-course I’ll have to remove personal info from it.

But the fact is this promise of only 50% achieving 1Gbps concerns me especially since their cable is not pure fibre all the way to the apartments from the basement. Even if they use Cat6e cables it’s still not regarded as FTTP. Fibre to the Premises is when it enters the door of your home. If it enters only the basement it is FTTB/H. There are complaints on the Trustpilot reviews of people not achieving anywhere near those speeds.

When copper causes interference and risk of noise margins and connection drops you want to remove all doubts and risks from your mind. Yes, the risk of noise margin interference is very small even if it travels inside the building. But I don’t want even 1% risk!

Some of us are waiting so many years for Fibre and we still can’t get a pure Fibre service, not very acceptable imho. Our flat in Bulgaria does not have such Cat5/6 cables it is pure Fibre and offers even 10Gbps service although 500 leva a month very expensive. Hyperoptic don’t yet offer 10Gbps not because 1Gbps is more than enough but because their Cat5/6e are incapable of delivering that promise. To quote “10-Gigabit Ethernet speeds are achievable when reducing cable lengths to less than 50 meters”

BT Openreach FTTP is pure but they don’t offer symmetrical upload speed but their service is more pure from that point of view. B4RN, Gigaclear, Community Fibre, etc offer pure FTTP from what I have understood thus far.

I believe FTTC can offer more than 76Mbps at less than 100 meters. It’s simply not a promise. Plus BT Openreach are capping the speeds somewhat because again DLM (Dynamic Line Management) will reduce the connection speed if it sees noise line instability.

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